Chapter 6 Mrs. Smith
Mrs. Smith
Mrs. Smith lurched over the dewy grass in her bare feet, her yellow toenails spearing the soft soil. Dark purple spider veins
covered her bony limbs like tattoos. As she moved, flakes of salt-white skin drifted to the ground, leaving a feast for the
mites and pill bugs. Her black hair was matted. The moonlight probed the bald patches on her skull.
She moved as fast as she could in her decaying human form.
Ahead, the water waited like a lover lying prostrate on black satin sheets.
It was just past midnight, and all was quiet.
To Mrs. Smith, however, it was never quiet. Even now, in the dead of night, her ears vibrated with a cacophony of human noise.
She heard steel lines clanging against aluminum boat masts. The persistent hum of air-conditioning. The rush of water through
pipes. The roar of a motorcycle. Somewhere, far above her, a plane whined as it cut through the clouds.
The quiet had been spoiled long ago. So had the darkness.
As she made her way to the boathouse, Mrs. Smith’s sensitive eyes were assaulted by a thousand pricks of light.
Lights glared from buildings and docks on the opposite shoreline.
Lights on the sailboats swayed as the vessels rocked in their sleep.
Lights from the windows, decks, and porches of her neighbors’ houses trespassed onto the fringes of her property.
If she could, she’d squeeze every bulb until it shattered. She’d slice through every power cable, restoring the true blackness
of night. The night did not belong to the humans sleeping in these air-conditioned houses. It belonged to creatures like her.
Predators.
Killers.
Light was the refuge of the weak.
Mrs. Smith always waited until the light and noise was at a minimum before venturing outside. Eager to escape terra firma,
Mrs. Smith entered her boathouse through the back door.
This close to the water, her skin began to itch. The muscles in her legs tensed. Her teeth and nails tingled.
She shed her robe and approached the channel cut through the middle of the floor. A sleek powerboat hung suspended above the
water. Draped in ash-gray canvas, it looked like an orca’s carcass.
The boat could be lowered into the channel, which maintained a depth of six to nine feet, and eased out into the harbor through
the main door. However, it was nothing more than a prop. The boathouse served another purpose. It allowed Mrs. Smith to enter
the water without being seen.
She was very, very careful to avoid being seen in her human form and even more so after she transformed. Her survival depended
on concealment.
As her ragged toenails scraped over the wood floor, she sensed her children waiting for her. They’d be just past the sandbar,
wriggling with anticipation.
I’m coming, children.
The itching intensified, but a smile touched Mrs. Smith’s thin lips as she padded over the rough floorboards and jumped into the channel. The water embraced her, its liquid fingers cooling her skin.
The saltwater hot tubs in her house kept Mrs. Smith’s scaly limbs hydrated during the day, but she hated them. She hated their
fiberglass basins and chrome dials. She hated their ridiculous jets and bubbles, their inane cupholders.
She spent most of the day languishing in one of several large tubs, reading books or flipping through magazines. She had piles
of magazines because she owned a company that printed hundreds of them every month. She had piles of books, too. She belonged
to the Literary Guild, the Dollar Book Club, the Book of the Month Club, and the Doubleday Book Club. She also had a library
of antique books and would revisit old favorites when she couldn’t stand to face yet another vapid novel by the likes of Jackie
Collins or Danielle Steel.
When Mrs. Smith grew tired of reading, she’d fall into a restless sleep and dream of a younger world.
She dreamed of oceans without boats, of jagged icebergs thrusting deep down into glacial waters, of colossal sharks and finned
serpents. She dreamed of submarine-sized eels. Of creatures moving soundlessly through the depths. Creatures like her. Creatures
with teeth. Powerful, magnificent, hungry hunters.
They were all dead now. All but her. And here she was, soaking in hot tubs and sneaking into the water under the cover of
night. It was too dangerous to hunt during the day. Human eyes were everywhere. The time when she could doze in underwater
caves, knowing she would never be discovered, had passed. She had to live a half-life among the creatures she despised most
or cease to exist at all.
Mrs. Smith retained her human form as she slithered under the gap in the boathouse door.
She swam like a frog for several strokes—taking care to remain below the surface—before finally shedding her fragile human husk.
Her legs divided into thin, elongated limbs. At the end of each rubbery, eel-like appendage was a needle-sharp barb. Her skin
darkened. Diamond-shaped scales erupted all over her body.
The bones in Mrs. Smith’s arms shattered and rearranged into spines. Her arms grew longer and longer, like pieces of pulled
taffy, and her fingers morphed into hooked claws. As her torso stretched and narrowed, her breasts flattened into calloused
disks. Her head swelled like an oval balloon, row after row of serrated teeth cutting through her gums. When she opened her
flexible lower jaw, her ink-black tongue wriggled out of her mouth like an adder slithering out of a cave.
Gills sliced through the flesh of her neck, and for the first time in many hours, Mrs. Smith could breathe.
The transformation had been painful. It always was. But the pain was already fading as she swam away from the shore, as her
eyes became bigger, rounder, and beetle black.
She had the cold, calculating stare of a great white, but the intelligence in her gaze made her far more terrifying. The most
formidable sharks in the ocean ate without discernment. They’d bite anything once. Mrs. Smith was far more selective.
Tonight, she would spurn her diet of whales and fish. It was the summer solstice, which meant her season of renewal had finally
begun. For nine months, she’d been fasting, eating only to survive. Now she would eat for pleasure.
These were the old laws—blood oaths put into place when humans first became a threat to ancient creatures. The laws between
the species were binding. And eternal.
The oath had been sworn so long ago that the humans no longer remembered it. Their numbers had grown too quickly. Their lives were too short. They were born, reproduced, and died in the blink of an eye. Their blood became diluted. The oaths and old ways were forgotten.
But Mrs. Smith remembered. The laws were etched into her DNA. They’d been transferred from mother to daughter for millennia.
Back when the humans were little more than apes dragging their knuckles on the ground, they had vowed not to hunt her kind.
In return, the Mother of Eels promised not to hunt humans unless they failed to give her what she needed at the end of her
hundred-year life cycle. If they failed to sacrifice their own to her when she asked, she could take what she needed.
There were no sacrifices now, but all Mrs. Smith had to do was devour the flesh of nine man-children between the summer solstice
and the fall equinox and she would be reborn.
Nine Pure Ones.
Nine unsullied pieces of flesh.
Nine was the number of power. The number of mastery. Of all timeless things. The creature in Mrs. Smith’s stained-glass window
had nine tentacles. Seven sprouted from her hips and two from her torso. These muscular appendages propelled her through the
water like a spear.
Mrs. Smith opened her mouth and emitted a sound beyond the range of human hearing. She swam under the moored boats, moving
faster and faster as she headed for the mouth of the harbor.
Diving deeper, she felt the caress of an eel’s body. And then another. And another.
Soon, there was a swirling, writhing cloud of eels. They swam in a mass above her, shielding her, camouflaging her. The eels
turned her into a shadow. A meaningless smudge on a ship’s sonar screen. An anomaly.
An anomaly is precisely what she was. She moved with such speed that it was difficult to distinguish her body from the water. She was a harpoon in animal form, swimming with her viper-shaped head jutting forward, her arms pinned to her sides. The thrusts of her lower tentacles were explosive.
With her children swimming above her, Mrs. Smith entered the deep waters of the Sound. The eels couldn’t keep pace with their
mother. They were not the giant eels of old but their smaller, slower descendants.
Still, they were legion, and as one swarm tired, a fresh swarm would suddenly appear to take over. Together, the dark, undulating
mass continued moving east until the land forked.
Here, at the northern tip of Long Island, in a place the humans called Plum Gut, Mrs. Smith would wait for her prey.
The waters in the channel between Orient Point and Plum Island were turbulent. The rip currents were strong even when the
surface of the water was smooth as ice. Squalls manifested out of nowhere, whipping the sea into a frenzy and effortlessly
capsizing small boats.
This is exactly what Mrs. Smith was hoping for.
At sunrise, the sea looked deceptively glassy. Mrs. Smith knew the commercial fishers and sports fishers would listen to the
weather forecast one last time before loading their boats with supplies and motoring away from their safe harbors.
Their misplaced faith in science would drive them into the channel where she lurked. They’d lower their nets, hooks, and traps
into the water, their engines excreting noxious gas and oil sheens. They’d launch aluminum cans and food wrappers over the
sides of their boats. Flick cigarette butts. Dump piss and feces.
Mrs. Smith smelled every contamination, no matter how small. She tasted every corruption. As she drifted along the bottom,